Meriem Bennani
Life on the Caps
Not All Travellers Walk Roads – Of Humanity as Practice.
The central proposal of this Bienal is to rethink humanity as a verb, a living practice, in a world that requires reimagining relationships, asymmetries and listening as the basis for coexistence, based on three curatorial fragments/axes. The metaphor of the estuary – a place where different water currents meet and create a space for coexistence – guides the curatorial project, inspired by Brazilian philosophies, landscapes and mythologies. This concept reflects the multiplicity of encounters that have marked Brazil’s history and proposes that humanity comes together and transforms itself through an attentive ear and negotiation between different beings and worlds.
About Life on the CAPS
Conceived as a utopic space, Bennani’s eight-channel video installation Life on the CAPS (2018-2019) brings us to a preposterous future where immigration is reduced to an island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, to begin a new society. Here the whole island of the CAPS is a performative metaphor for how we think of diasporic movements. Indeed Bennani’s most prolific question has been probably: how can we overcome the binary identity politics of assimilation and belongingness through experimenting a third space, the space in-between, mixing and translating locations and cultures.